Spinning Silver

THE REAL STORY isn’t half as pretty as the one you’ve heard. The real story is, the miller’s daughter with her long golden hair wants to catch a lord, a prince, a rich man’s son, so she goes to the moneylender and borrows for a ring and a necklace and decks herself out for the festival. And she’s beautiful enough, so the lord, the prince, the rich man’s son notices her, and dances with her, and tumbles her in a quiet hayloft when the dancing is over, and afterward he goes home and marries the rich woman his family has picked out for him. Then the miller’s disappointed daughter tells everyone that the moneylender’s in league with the devil, and the village runs him out or maybe even stones him, so at least she gets to keep the jewels, and the blacksmith marries her before that firstborn child comes along a little early.

Because that’s what the story’s really about: getting out of paying your debts. That’s not how they tell it, but I knew. My father was a moneylender, you see.

He wasn’t very good at it. If someone didn’t pay him back on time, he never so much as mentioned it to them. Only if our cupboards were really bare, or our shoes were falling off our feet, and my mother spoke quietly with him after I was in bed: then he’d go, unhappy, and knock on a few doors, and make it sound like an apology when he asked for some of what they owed. And if there was money in the house and someone asked to borrow, he hated to say no, even if we didn’t really have enough ourselves. So all his money, most of which had been my mother’s money, her dowry, stayed in other people’s houses. And everyone else liked it that way, even though they knew they ought to be ashamed of themselves, so they told the story often, even or especially when I could hear it.

My mother’s father was a moneylender too, but he was a very good one. He lived in the city, twenty miles away. She often took me on visits, when she could afford to pay someone to let us ride along at the back of a cart or a sledge, five or six changes along the way. My grandmother would always have a new dress for me, plain but warm and well made, and she would feed me to bursting, and the last night before we left she would always make cheesecake, her cheesecake, which was baked golden on the outside and thick and white and crumbly inside and tasted just a little bit of apples, and she would make decorations with sweet golden raisins on the top. After I had slowly and lingeringly eaten every last bite of a slice wider than the palm of my hand, they would put me to bed in the warmest corner of the big, cozy sitting room near the fireplace, and my mother would sit next to her mother, and put her head on her shoulder, and not say anything, but when I was a little older and didn’t fall asleep right away, I would see in the candlelight that both of them had a little wet track of tears down their faces.

We could have stayed. But we always went home, because we loved my father. He was terrible with money, but he was endlessly warm and gentle, and he tried to make his failure up to us: he spent nearly all of every day out in the cold woods hunting for food and firewood, and when he was indoors, there was nothing he wouldn’t do to help my mother; no talk of woman’s work in my house, and when we did go hungry, he went hungriest, and snuck food from his plate to ours. When he sat by the fire in the evenings, his hands were always working, whittling some new little toy for me or something for my mother, a decoration on a chair or a wooden spoon.

But winter was always bitter in our town, and every year seemed worse. The year I turned sixteen, the ground froze early, and cold, sharp winds blew out of the forest every day, it seemed, carrying whirls of stinging snow. Our house stood a little bit apart from the rest anyway, without other walls nearby to share in breaking the wind, and we grew thin and hungry and shivering. My father kept making his excuses, avoiding the work he couldn’t bear to do. But even when my mother finally pressed him and he tried, he only came back with a scant handful of coins. It was midwinter, and everyone wanted to have something good on the table; something a little nice for the festival, their festival.

So they put my father off, and while their lights shone out on the snow and the smell of roasting meat slipped out of the cracks, at home my mother made thin cabbage soup and scrounged together used cooking oil to light the lamp for the first night of our own celebration, coughing as she worked: another deep chill had rolled in from the woods, and it crept through every crack and eave of our run-down little house.

By the eighth day, she was too tired from coughing to get out of bed. “She’ll be all right soon,” my father said, avoiding my eyes. “The cold will break.”

He went out to gather some firewood. “Miryem,” my mother said, hoarsely, and I took her a cup of weak tea with a scraping of honey, all I had to comfort her. She sipped a little and lay back on the pillows and said, “When the winter breaks, I want you to go to my father’s house. He’ll take you to my father’s house.”

I pressed my lips together hard, and then I kissed her forehead and told her to rest, and after she fell fitfully asleep, I went to the box next to the fireplace where my father kept his big ledger book. I took it out, and I took his worn pen out of its holder, and I mixed ink out of the ashes in the fireplace, and I made a list. A moneylender’s daughter, even a bad moneylender, learns her figures. I wrote and figured and wrote and figured, interest and time broken up by the scattered payments—because my father had every one of those written down; he was as scrupulous in making sure he didn’t cheat anyone as no one else was with him, and when I had my list finished, I took all the knitting out of my bag, put my shawl on, and went out into the cold morning.

I went to every house that owed us, and I banged on their doors: it was early, very early, because my mother’s coughing had woken us in the dark. Everyone was still at home. So the men opened the doors and stared at me in surprise, and I looked them in their faces and said, cold and hard, “I’ve come to settle your account.”

They tried to put me off, of course; some of them laughed at me. Some of them smiled and asked me to come inside and warm myself up, have a hot drink. I refused. I didn’t want to be warmed. I stood on their doorsteps, and I brought out my list, and I told them how much they had borrowed, and what they had paid, and how much interest they owed besides.

They spluttered and argued and some of them shouted. No one had ever shouted at me in my life: my mother with her quiet voice, my gentle father. But I found something bitter inside myself, something of winter blown into my heart: the sound of my mother coughing, and the memory of the story told too many times in the village square. I stayed in their doorways, and I didn’t move. My numbers were true, and they and I knew it, and when they’d shouted themselves out, I said, “Do you have the money?”

They thought it was an opening. They said no, of course not; they didn’t have such a sum.

“Then you’ll pay me a little now, and again every week, until your debt is cleared,” I said, “and pay interest on what you haven’t paid, if you don’t want me to send to my grandfather to bring the law into it.”

Our town was small, and no one traveled very much. They knew my mother’s father was rich, and lived in a great house in the city, and had loaned money to knights and once to a lord. So they gave me a little, grudgingly; only a few pennies in some houses, but every one of them gave me something, and I wrote down the numbers in front of them and told them I would see them next week. On my way home, I stopped in at Panova Lyudmila’s house, who took in travelers when they stayed overnight. She didn’t borrow money: she could have lent it too, except for charging interest. And if anyone in our town had been foolish enough to borrow from anyone but my father, who would let them pay as they liked or didn’t. I didn’t collect anything; from her I bought a pot of hot soup, with half a chicken in it, and three fresh eggs, and a bowl of honeycomb covered with a napkin.

My father had come back home before me; he was feeding the fire, and he looked up worried when I shouldered my way in. He stared at my arms full of food. I put it all down and I put the rest of the pennies and the handful of silver into the kettle next to our own hearth, and I gave him the list with the payments written on it, and then I turned to making my mother comfortable.

After that, I was the moneylender in our little town. And I was a good moneylender, and a lot of people owed us money, so very soon the straw of our floor was smooth boards of golden wood, and the cracks in our fireplace were chinked with good clay and our roof was thatched fresh, and my mother had a fur cloak to sleep under or to wear. She didn’t like it at all, and neither did my father, who went outside and wept quietly to himself the day I brought the cloak home. The baker’s wife had offered it to me in payment for the rest of her family’s debt. It was beautiful; she’d brought it with her when she married, made of ermines her father had hunted in his lord’s woods.

That part of the story turned out to be true: you have to be cruel to be a good moneylender. But I was ready to be as merciless with our neighbors as they’d been with my father. I didn’t take firstborn children exactly, but one week, one of the peasant farmers had nothing to pay me with, not even a spare loaf of bread, and he cursed me with real desperation in his voice and said, “You can’t suck blood from a stone.”

I should have felt sorry for him, I suppose. My father would have, and my mother, but wrapped in my coldness, I felt only the danger of the moment. If I forgave him, took his excuses, next week everyone would have an excuse; I saw everything unraveling again from there.

Then the farmer’s tall daughter came staggering in, a heavy gray kerchief over her head and a big heavy yoke across her shoulders, carrying two buckets of water, twice as much as I could manage when I went for water to the village well myself. I said, “Then your daughter will come work in my house to pay off the debt, three mornings this week and every week you can’t pay,” and I walked home pleased as a cat, and even danced a few steps to myself in the road, alone under the trees.

Her name was Wanda. She came silently to the house at dawn, three days a week, worked like an ox until midday, and left silently again; she kept her head down the entire time. She was very strong, and she took almost all the burden of the housework in just her three mornings. She carried water and chopped wood, and tended the small flock of hens we now had scratching in our yard, and watered the new goats and milked them, and scrubbed the floors and our hearth and all our pots, and I was well satisfied with my solution.

For the first time in my life, I heard my mother speak to my father in anger, in blame, as she hadn’t even when she was cold and sick. “And you don’t care for what it does to her?” I heard her cry out to him.

“What shall I say to her?” he cried back. “What shall I say? No, you shall starve; no, you shall go cold and you will wear rags?”

“If you had the coldness to do it yourself, you could be cold enough to let her do it,” my mother said. “Our daughter, Josef!”

But when my father looked me in the face that night and tried to say something to me, the coldness in me met him and drove him back, just as it had when he’d met it in the village, asking for what he was owed.

So in desperation my mother took me away on a visit when the air warmed with spring and her cough finally went away, drowned in soup and honey. I didn’t like to leave, but I did want to see my grandmother, and show her that her daughter wasn’t sleeping cold and frozen, that her granddaughter didn’t go like a beggar anymore; I wanted to visit without seeing her weep, for once. I went on my rounds one last time and told everyone as I did that I would add on extra interest for the weeks I was gone, unless they left their payments at our house while I was away.

Then we drove to my grandfather’s house, but this time I hired our neighbor Oleg to take us all the way with his good horses and his big wagon, heaped with straw and blankets and jingling bells on the harness, with the fur cloak spread over all against the March wind. My grandmother came out, surprised, to meet us when we drew up to the house, and my mother went into her arms, silent and hiding her face. “Well, come in and warm up,” my grandmother said, looking at the sledge and our good new wool dresses, trimmed with rabbit fur, and a golden button at the neck on mine, that had come out of the weaver’s chest.

She sent me to take my grandfather fresh hot water in his study, so she could talk to my mother alone. My grandfather had rarely done more than grunt at me and look me up and down disapprovingly in the dresses my grandmother had bought. I don’t know how I knew what he thought of my father, because I don’t remember him ever having said a word about it, but I did know.

He looked me over this time out from under his bristling eyebrows and frowned. “Fur, now? And gold?”

I should say that I was properly brought up, and I knew better than to talk back to my own grandfather of all people, but I was already angry that my mother was upset, and that my grandmother wasn’t pleased, and now to have him pick at me, him of all people. “Why shouldn’t I have it, instead of someone who bought it with my father’s money?” I said.

My grandfather was as surprised as you would expect to be spoken to like this by his granddaughter, but then he heard what I had said and frowned at me again. “Your father bought it for you, then?”

Loyalty and love stopped my mouth there, and I dropped my eyes and silently finished pouring the hot water into the samovar and changing out the tea. My grandfather didn’t stop me going away, but by the next morning he knew the whole story somehow, that I’d taken over my father’s work, and suddenly he was pleased with me, as he never had been before and no one else was.

He had two other daughters who had married better than my mother, to rich city men with good trades. None of them had given him a grandson who wanted to take up his business. In the city, there were enough of my people that we could be something other than a banker, or a farmer who grew his own food: there were enough people who would buy your goods, and there was a thriving market in our quarter.

“It’s not seemly for a girl,” my grandmother tried, but my grandfather snorted.

“Gold doesn’t know the hand that holds it,” he said, and frowned at me, but in a pleased way. “You’ll need servants,” he told me. “One to start with, a good strong simple man or woman: can you find one?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking of Wanda: she had nearly paid off her father’s debt by now, but she was already used to coming, and in our town there wasn’t much other chance for a poor farmer’s daughter to earn a wage.

“Good. Don’t go yourself to get the money,” he said. “You send a servant, and if they want to argue, they come to you.”

I nodded, and when we went home, he gave me a purse full of silver pennies to lend out, to towns near ours that hadn’t any moneylender of their own. And when my mother and I came again in the winter for another visit, after the first snowfall, I brought it back full of gold to put into the bank, and my grandfather was proud of me.

They hadn’t had guests over usually, when we were visiting, except my mother’s sisters. I hadn’t noticed before, but I noticed now, because suddenly the house was full of people coming to drink tea, to stay to dinner, lights and bustling dresses and laughing voices, and I met more city people in that one week than I had in all the visits before. “I don’t believe in selling a sow’s ear for a silk purse,” my grandfather told me bluntly, when I asked him. “Your father couldn’t dower you as the guests who come to this house would expect of my granddaughter, and I swore to your mother that I would never put more money in his pocket, to fall back out again.”

I understood then why he hadn’t wanted my grandmother buying dresses for me, as he’d thought, with fur and gold buttons on them. He wouldn’t try to make a princess out of a miller’s daughter with borrowed finery, and snare her a husband fool enough to be tricked by it, or who’d slip out of the bargain when he learned the truth.

It didn’t make me angry; I liked him better for that cold, hard honesty, and it made me proud that now he did invite his guests, and even boasted of me to them, how I’d taken away a purse of silver and brought back one of gold.

But my grandmother kept her mouth pursed shut; my mother’s was empty of smiles. I was angry at her again as we flew home in the warm sledge over the frozen roads. I had another purse of silver hidden deep under my own fur cloak, and three petticoats underneath my dress, and I didn’t feel cold at all, but her face was tight and drawn.

“Would you rather we were still poor and hungry?” I burst out to her finally, the silence between us heavy in the midst of the dark woods, and she put her arms around me and kissed me and said, “My darling, my darling, I’m sorry,” weeping a little.

“Sorry?” I said. “To be warm instead of cold? To be rich and comfortable? To have a daughter who can turn silver into gold?” I pushed away from her.

“To see you harden yourself like a stone, to make it so,” she said. We didn’t speak the rest of the way home.

I didn’t believe in stories, even though we lived in the middle of one: our village had been cut out of the North Forest, a little too near the depths where they said the old ones lived, the Staryk. Children who ran playing in the woods would sometimes stumble across their road and come home with one of the pebbles that lined it: an unnaturally smooth pebble that shone in starlight, and got lost again very quickly no matter how much care you took with it. I saw them displayed in the village square a couple of times, but they only looked like smooth white pebbles, and I didn’t think magic was needed to explain why children lost a rock again in short order.

You weren’t supposed to ride through the woods dressed too fine, because they loved gold and gems and finery, but again, I didn’t mean to be afraid of fairy lords when thieves would do just as well, to make it poor sense to go riding through a deep forest wearing all your jewels. If you found a grove full of red mushrooms with white spots, you were supposed to go back out again and stay well away, because that was one of their dancing rings, and if someone went missing in the woods they’d taken him or her, and once in a while someone would come staggering out of the forest, feverish, and claim to have seen one of them.

I never saw the road, or took any of it seriously, but the morning after my mother and I came back home, Wanda ran back inside, afraid, after she’d gone out to feed the chickens. “They’ve been outside the house!” was all she said, and she wouldn’t go out again alone. My father took the iron poker from the fireplace and we all went out cautiously behind him, thinking there might be burglars or wolves, but there were only prints in the snow. Strange prints: a little like deer, but with claws at the end, and too large, the size of horses’ hooves. They came right to the wall of the house, and then someone had climbed off the beast and looked through our window: someone wearing boots with a long pointed toe.

I wasn’t stubborn about my disbelief, when I had footprints in snow to show me something strange had happened. If nothing else, no one anywhere near our town had boots that absurd, for fashion; only someone who didn’t have to walk anywhere would have shoes like that. But there didn’t seem to be anything to do about it, and they’d left, whoever they’d been. I told Wanda we’d hire her brother to come and guard the house during the night, mostly so she wouldn’t be afraid and maybe leave her place, and then I put it out of my mind.

But the tracks were there again the next morning, though Sergey swore he’d been awake all night and hadn’t heard a thing.

“If the Staryk haven’t anything better to do but peer in at our windows, I suppose they can,” I said out loud and clear, standing in the yard. “We’re no fools to keep our gold in the house: it’s in Grandfather’s vault,” which I hoped might be overheard and do some good whether it was an elf or a thief or someone trying to scare me.

It did something, anyway; that night as we sat at our work in the kitchen, my mother doing the fine sewing she loved, and I with my spindle, my father silently whittling with his head bowed, there was suddenly a banging at the door, a heavy thumping as though someone were knocking against the wood with something metal. Wanda sprang up from the kettle with a cry, and we all held still: it was a cold night, snow falling, and no one would come out at such an hour. The knocking came again, and then my father said, “Well, it’s a polite devil, at least,” and got up and went to the door.

When he opened it, no one was there, but there was a small bag sitting on the threshold. He stepped outside and looked around to one side and the other: no one anywhere in sight. Then he gingerly picked up the bag and brought it inside and put it on the table. We all gathered around it and stared as though it were a live coal that might at any moment set the whole house ablaze.

It was made of leather, white leather, but not dyed by any ordinary way I’d ever heard of: it looked as though it had always been white, all the way through. There wasn’t a seam or stitch to be seen on its sides, and it clasped shut with a small lock made of silver. Finally, when no one else moved to touch it, I reached out and opened the clasp, and tipped out a few small silver coins, thin and flat and perfectly round, not enough to fill the hollow of my palm. Our house was full of warm firelight, but they shone coldly, as if they stood under the moon.

“It’s very kind of them to make us such a present,” my father said after a moment doubtfully, but we all knew the Staryk would never do such a thing. There were stories from other kingdoms farther south, of fairies who came with gifts, but not in ours. And then my mother drew a sharp breath and looked at me and said, low, “They want it turned into gold.”

I suppose it was my own fault, bragging in the woods where they could hear me, but now I didn’t know what to do. Moneylending isn’t magic: I couldn’t lend the coins out today and have the profit back tomorrow, and I didn’t think they meant to wait a year or more for their return. Anyway, the reason I had brought in so much money so quickly was that my father had lent out all my mother’s dowry over years and years, and everyone had kept the money so long they had built heaps of interest even at the little rate my father had charged them.

“We’ll have to take the money from the bank,” my mother said. There were six silver coins in the bag. I had put fourteen gold coins in the bank this last visit, and the city was only an eight-hour sleigh ride away when the snow was packed this hard. But I rebelled: I didn’t mean to trade our gold, my gold, for fairy silver.

“I’ll go to the city tomorrow,” was all I said, but when I went, I didn’t go to the bank. I slept that night in my grandfather’s house, behind the thick walls of the quarter, and early the next morning, I went down to the market. I found a seat upon the temple steps while the sellers put out their stalls: everything from apples to hammers to jeweled belts, and I waited while the buyers slowly trickled in. I watched through the morning rush, and after it thinned out, I went to the stall of the jeweler who had been visited by the most people in drab clothes: I guessed they had to be servants from the rich people of the city.

The jeweler was a young man with spectacles and stubby but careful fingers, his beard trimmed short to stay out of his work; he was bent over an anvil in miniature, hammering out a disk of silver with his tiny tools, enormously precise. I stood watching him work for maybe half an hour before he sighed and said, “Yes?” with a faint hint of resignation, as though he’d hoped I would go away, instead of troubling him to do any business. But he seemed to know what he was about, so I brought out my pouch of silver coins and spilled them onto the black cloth he worked upon.

“It’s not enough to buy anything here,” he said, matter-of-factly, with barely a glance; he started to go back to his work, but then he frowned a little and turned around again. He picked one coin up and peered at it closely, and turned it over in his fingers, and rubbed it between them, and then he put it down and stared at me. “Where did you get these?”

“They came from the Staryk, if you want to believe me,” I said. “Can you make them into something? A bracelet or a ring?”

“I’ll buy them from you,” he offered.

“No, thank you,” I said.

“To make them into a ring would cost you two gold coins,” he said. “Or I’ll buy them from you for five.”

“I’ll pay you one,” I said firmly, “or if you like, you can sell the ring for me and keep half the profit,” which was what I really wanted. “I have to give the Staryk back six gold coins in exchange.”

He grumbled a little but finally agreed, which meant he thought he could sell it for a high enough price to make it worthwhile, and then he set about the work. He melted the silver over a hot little flame and ran it into a mold, a thick one made of iron, and when it had half cooled, he took it out with his leathered fingertips and etched a pattern into the surface, fanciful, full of leaves and branches.

It didn’t take him long: the silver melted easily and cooled easily and took the pattern easily, and when it was done, the pattern seemed oddly to move and shift: it drew the eye and held it, and shone even in the midday sun. We looked down at it for a while, and then he said, “The duke will buy it,” and sent his apprentice running into the city. A tall, imperious servant in velvet clothes and gold braid came back with the boy, making clear in every expression how annoyed he was by the interruption of his more important work, but even he stopped being annoyed when he saw the ring and held it on his palm.

The duke paid ten gold coins for the ring, so I put two in the bank, and six back into the little white pouch, and I climbed back into Oleg’s sledge to go home that same evening. We flew through the snow and dark, the horse trotting quickly with only my weight in back. But in the woods the horse slowed, and then dropped to a walk, and then halted; I thought she just needed a rest, but she stood unmoving with her ears pricked up anxiously, warm breath gusting out of her nostrils. “Why are we stopping?” I asked, and Oleg didn’t answer me: he slumped in his seat as though he slept.

The snow crunched behind me once and once again: something picking its way toward the sleigh from behind, step by heavy step. I swallowed and drew my cloak around me, and then I summoned up all the winter-cold courage I’d built inside me and turned around.

The Staryk didn’t look so terribly strange at first; that was what made him truly terrible, as I kept looking and slowly his face became something inhuman, shaped out of ice and glass, and his eyes like silver knives. He had no beard and wore his white hair in a long braid down his back. His clothes, just like his purse, were all in white. He was riding a stag, but a stag larger than a draft horse, with antlers branched twelve times and hung with clear glass drops, and when it put out its red tongue to lick its muzzle, its teeth were sharp as a wolf’s.

I wanted to quail, to cower; but I knew where that led. Instead I held my fur cloak tight at the throat with one hand against the chill that rolled off him, and with my other I held out the bag to him, in silence, as he came close to the sleigh.

He paused, eyeing me out of one silver-blue eye with his head turned sideways, like a bird. He put out his gloved hand and took the bag, and he opened it and poured the six gold coins out into the cup of his hand, the faint jingle loud in the silence around us. The coins looked warm and sun-bright against the white of his glove. He looked down at them and seemed vaguely disappointed, as though he was sorry I’d managed it; and then he put them away and the bag vanished somewhere beneath his own long cloak.

I called up all my courage and spoke, throwing my words against the hard, icy silence like a shell around us. “I’ll need more than a day next time, if you want more of them changed,” I said, a struggle to keep trembling out of my voice.

He lifted his head and stared at me, as though surprised I’d dared to speak to him, and then he wasn’t there anymore; Oleg shook himself all over and chirruped to the horse, and we were trotting again. I fell back into the blankets, shivering. The tips of my fingers where I’d held out the purse were numbed and cold. I pulled off my glove and tucked them underneath my arm to warm them up, wincing as they touched my skin.

One week went by, and I began to forget about the Staryk, about all of it. We all did, the way one forgets dreams: you’re trying to explain the story of it to someone and halfway through it’s already running quicksilver out of your memory, too wrong and ill-fitting to keep in your mind. I didn’t have any of the fairy silver left to prove the whole thing real, not even the little purse. Even that same night I’d come home, I hadn’t been able to describe him to my anxious mother; I’d only been able to say, “It’s all right, I gave him the gold,” and then I’d fallen into bed. By morning I couldn’t remember his face.

But Sunday night the knocking came again at the door, and I froze for a moment. I was standing already, about to fetch a dish of dried fruit from the pantry; with a lurch of my heart I went to the door and flung it open.

A burst of wind came growling through the house, as cold as if it had been shaved directly off the frozen crust of the snow. The Staryk hadn’t abandoned a purse on the stoop this time: he stood waiting outside, all the more unearthly for the frame of wood around his sharp edges. I looked back into the house wildly, to see if they saw him also; but my father was bent over his whittling as though he hadn’t even heard the door opening, and my mother was looking into the fire with a dreamy, vague look on her face. Wanda lay sleeping on her pallet already, and her brother had gone home three days before.

I turned back. The Staryk held another purse out to me, to the very border of the door, and spoke, a high, thin voice like wind whistling through the eaves. “Three days,” he said.

I was afraid of him, of course; I wasn’t a fool. But I had only believed in him for a week, and I had spent all my life learning to fear other things more: to be taken advantage of, used unfairly. “And what in return?” I blurted, putting my hands behind my back.

His eyes sharpened, and I regretted pressing him. “Thrice, mortal maiden,” he said, in a rhythm almost like a song. “Thrice shall I come, and you shall turn silver to gold for my hands, or be changed into ice yourself.”

I felt half ice already, chilled down to my bones. I swallowed. “And then?”

He laughed and said, “And then I will make you my queen, if you manage it,” mockingly, and threw the purse down at my feet, jingling loud. When I looked back up from it, he was gone, and my mother behind me said, slow and struggling, as if it was an effort to speak, “Miryem, why are you keeping the door open? The cold’s coming in.”

I had never felt sorry for the miller’s daughter before, in the story: I’d been too sorry for my father, and myself. But who would really like it, after all, to be married to a king who’d as cheerfully have cut off your head if your dowry didn’t match your boasting? I didn’t want to be the Staryk’s queen any more than I wanted to be his servant, or frozen into ice.

The purse he’d left was ten times as heavy as before, full of shining coins. I counted them out into smooth-sided towers, to try and put my mind into order along with them. “We’ll leave,” my mother said. I hadn’t told her what the Staryk had promised, or threatened, but she didn’t like it anyway: an elven lord coming to demand I give him gold. “We’ll go to my father, or farther away,” but I felt sure that wasn’t any good. I hadn’t wanted to believe in the Staryk at all, but now that I couldn’t help it, I didn’t believe there was a place I could run away that he wouldn’t find some way to follow. And if I did, then what? My whole life afraid, looking around for the sound of footfalls in snow?

Anyway, we couldn’t just go. It would mean bribes to cross each border, and a new home wherever we found ourselves in the end, and who knew how they’d treat us when we got there? We’d heard enough stories of what happened to our people in other countries, under kings and bishops who wanted their own debts forgiven, and to fill their purses with confiscated wealth.

So I put the six towers of coins, ten in each, back into the purse, and I sent Wanda for Oleg’s sledge. We drove back to the city that very night, not to lose any of my precious time. “Do you have any more?” Isaac the jeweler demanded the moment he saw me, eagerly, and then he flushed and said, “That is, welcome back,” remembering he had manners.

“Yes, I have more,” I said, and spilled them out on the cloth. “I need to give back sixty gold this time,” I told him.

He was already turning them over with his hands, his face alight with hunger. “I couldn’t remember,” he said, half to himself, and then he heard what I’d said and gawked at me. “I need a little profit for the work that this will take!”

“There’s enough to make ten rings, at ten gold each,” I said.

“I couldn’t sell them all.”

“Yes, you could,” I said. That, I was sure of: if the duke had a ring of fairy silver, every wealthy man and woman in the city needed a ring just like it, right away.

He frowned down over the coins, stirring them with his fingers, and sighed. “I’ll make a necklace, and see what we can get.”

“You really don’t think you can sell ten rings?” I said, surprised, wondering if I was wrong.

“I want to make a necklace,” he said, which didn’t seem very sensible to me, but perhaps he thought it would show his work off and make a name for him. I didn’t really mind as long as I could pay off my Staryk for another week.

“I only have three days,” I said. “Can you do it that quickly?”

He groaned. “Why must you ask for impossibilities?”

“Do those look possible to you?” I said, pointing at the coins, and he couldn’t really argue with that.

I had to sit with him while he worked, and manage the people who came to the stall wanting other things from him; he didn’t want to talk to anyone and be interrupted. Most of them were busy and irritated servants, some of them expecting goods to be finished; they snapped and glared, wanting me to cower, but I met their bluster too and said coolly, “Surely you can see what Master Isaac is working on. I’m sure your mistress or your master wouldn’t wish you to interrupt a patron I cannot name, but who would purchase such a piece,” and I waved to send their eyes over to the worktable, where the full sunlight shone on the silver beneath his hands. Its cold gleam silenced them; they stood staring a little while and then went away, without trying to argue again.

I noticed that Isaac tried to save a few of the coins aside while he worked, as though he wanted to keep them to remember. I thought of asking him for one to keep myself; but it didn’t work. On the morning of the third day, he sighed and took the last of the ones he’d saved and melted it down, and strung a last bit of silver lace upon the design. “It’s done,” he said afterward, and picked it up in his hands: the silver hung over his broad palms like icicles, and we stood looking at it silently together for a while.

“Will you send to the duke?” I asked.

He shook his head and took out a box from his supplies: square and made of carved wood lined with black velvet, and he laid the necklace carefully inside. “No,” he said. “For this, I will go to him. Do you want to come?”

“Can I go and change my dress?” I said, a little doubtful: I didn’t really want the necklace to go so far out of my sight unpurchased, but I was wearing a plain work dress only for sitting in the market all day.

“How far do you live?” he said, just as doubtful.

“My grandfather’s house is only down the street with the ash tree and around the corner,” I said. “Three doors down from the red stables.”

He frowned a moment. “That’s Panov Moshel’s house.”

“That’s my grandfather,” I said, and he looked at me, surprised, and then in a new way I didn’t understand until I was inside, putting on my good dress with the fur and the gold buttons, and I looked down at myself and patted my hair and wondered if I looked well, and then my cheeks prickled with sudden heat. “Do you know Isaac, the jeweler?” I blurted to my grandmother, turning away from the brass mirror.

She peered at me over her spectacles, narrowly. “I’ve met his mother. He’s a respectable young man,” she allowed, after some thought. “Do you want me to put up your hair again?”

So I took a little longer than he would have liked, I suspect, to come back; then we went together to the gates and through the wall around our quarter, and walked into the streets of the city. The houses nearest were mean and low, run-down; but Isaac led me to the wider streets, past an enormous church of gray stone with windows like jewelry themselves, and finally to the enormous mansions of the nobles. I couldn’t help staring at the iron fences wrought into lions and writhing dragons, and the walls covered with vining fruits and flowers sculpted out of stone. I admit I was glad not to be alone when we went through the open gates and up the wide stone steps swept clear of snow.

Isaac spoke to one of the servants. We were taken to a small room to wait: no one offered us anything to drink, or a place to sit, and a manservant stood looking at us with disapproval. I was grateful, though: irritation made me feel less small and less tempted to gawk. Finally the servant who had come to the market last time came in and demanded to know our business. Isaac brought out the box and showed him the necklace; he stared down at it, and then said shortly, “Very well,” and went away again. Half an hour later he reappeared and ordered us to follow him: we were led up back stairs and then abruptly emerged into a hall more sumptuous than anything I had ever seen, the walls hung with tapestries in bright colors and the floor laid with a beautifully patterned rug.

It silenced our feet and led us into a sitting room even more luxurious, where a man in rich clothes and a golden chain sat in an enormous chair covered in velvet at a writing table. I saw the ring of fairy silver on the first finger of his hand, resting on the arm of the chair. He didn’t look down at it, but I noticed he thumbed it around now and again, as though he wanted to make sure it hadn’t vanished from his hand. “All right, let’s see it.”

“Your Grace.” Isaac bowed and showed him the necklace.

The duke stared into the box. His face didn’t change, but he stirred the necklace gently on its bed with one finger, just barely moving the looped lacelike strands of it. He finally drew a breath and let it out again through his nose. “And how much do you ask for it?”

“Your Grace, I cannot sell it for less than a hundred and fifty.”

“Absurd,” the duke growled. I had a struggle to keep from biting my lip, myself: it was rather outrageous.

“Otherwise I must melt it down and make it into rings,” Isaac said, spreading his hands apologetically. I thought that was rather clever: of course the duke would rather no one else had a ring like his.

“Where are you getting this silver from?” the duke demanded. Isaac hesitated, and then looked at me. The duke followed his eyes. “Well? You’re bringing it from somewhere.”

I curtsied, as deeply as I could manage and still get myself back up. “I was given it by one of the Staryk, my lord,” I said. “He wants it changed for gold.”

“And you mean to do it through my purse, I see,” the duke said. “How much more of this silver will there be?”

I had been worrying about that, whether the Staryk would bring even more silver next time, and what I would do with it if he did: the first time six, the second time sixty; how would I get six hundred pieces of gold? I swallowed. “Maybe—maybe much more.”

“Hm,” the duke said, and studied the necklace again. Then he put his hand to one side and took up a bell and rang it; the servant reappeared in the doorway. “Go and bring Irina to me,” he said, and the man bowed. We waited a handful of minutes, and then a woman came to the door, a girl perhaps a year younger than me, slim and demure in a plain gray woolen gown, modestly high-necked, with a fine gray silken veil trailing back over her head. Her chaperone came after her, an older woman scowling at me and especially at Isaac.

Irina curtsied to the duke without raising her downcast eyes. He stood up and took the necklace over to her, and put it around her neck. He stepped back and studied her, and we did too. She wasn’t especially beautiful, I would have said, only ordinary, except her hair was long and dark and thick; but it didn’t really matter with the necklace on her. It was hard even to glance away from her, with all of winter clasped around her throat and the silver gleam catching in her veil and in her eyes as they darted sideways to catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror on the wall there.

“Ah, Irinushka,” the chaperone murmured, approvingly, and the duke nodded.

He turned back to us. “Well, jeweler, you are in luck: the tsar visits us next week. You may have a hundred gold pieces for your necklace, and the next thing you make will be a crown fit for a queen, to be my daughter’s dowry: you will have ten times a hundred gold for it, if the tsar takes her hand.”

I left twenty gold pieces in the bank and carried the swollen purse into the sledge waiting to carry me home. My shoulders tightened as we plunged into the forest, wondering when and if the Staryk would come on me once more, until halfway down the road the sledge began to slow and stop under the dark boughs. I went rabbit-still, looking around for any signs of him, but I didn’t see anything; the horse stamped and snorted her warm breath, and Oleg didn’t slump over, but hung his reins on the footboard.

“Did you hear something?” I said, my voice hushed, and then he climbed down and took out a knife from under his coat, and I realized I’d forgotten to worry about anything else but magic. I scrambled desperately away, shoving the heaped blankets toward him and floundering through the straw and out the other side of the sledge. “Don’t,” I blurted. “Oleg, don’t,” my heavy skirts dragging in the snow as he came around for me. “Oleg, please,” but his face was clenched down, cold deeper than any winter. “This is the Staryk’s gold, not mine!” I cried in desperation, holding the purse out between us.

He didn’t stop. “None of it’s yours,” he snarled. “None of it’s yours, little grubbing vulture, taking money out of the hands of honest working men,” and I knew the sound of a man telling himself a story to persuade himself he wasn’t doing wrong, that he had a right to what he’d taken.

I gripped two big handfuls of my skirts and struggled back, my boot heels digging into the snow. He lunged, and I flung myself away, falling backward. The crust atop the snow gave beneath my weight, and I couldn’t get up. He was standing over me, ready to reach down, and then he halted; his arms sank down to his sides.

It wasn’t mercy. A deeper cold was coming into his face, stealing blue over his lips, and white frost was climbing over his thick brown beard. I struggled to my feet, shivering. The Staryk was standing behind him, a hand laid upon the back of his neck like a master taking hold of a dog’s scruff.

In a moment, he dropped his hand. Oleg stood blank between us, bloodless as frostbite, and then he turned and slowly went back to the sledge and climbed into the driving seat. The Staryk didn’t watch him go, as if he cared nothing; he only looked at me with his eyes as gleaming as Oleg’s blade. I was shaking and queasy. There were tears freezing on my eyelashes, making them stick. I blinked them away and held my hands tight together until they stopped trembling, and then I held out the purse.

The Staryk came closer and took it. He didn’t pour the purse out: it was too full for that. Instead he dipped his hand inside and lifted out a handful of shining coins to tumble ringing back into the bag, weighed in his other palm, until there was only one last coin held between his white-gloved fingers. He frowned at it, and me.

“It’s all there, all sixty,” I said. My heart had slowed, because I suppose it was that or burst.

“As it must be,” he said. “For fail me, and to ice you shall go.”

But he seemed displeased anyway, although he had set the terms himself: as though he wanted to freeze me but couldn’t break a bargain once he’d made it. “Now go home, mortal maiden, until I call on you again.”

I looked over helplessly at the sledge: Oleg was sitting in the driver’s seat, staring with his frozen face out into the winter, and the last thing I wanted was to get in with him. But I couldn’t walk home from here, or even to some village where I could hire another driver. I had no idea where we were. I turned to argue, but the Staryk was already gone. I stood alone under pine boughs heavy with snow, with only silence and footprints around me, and the deep crushed hollow where I had fallen, the shape of a girl against the drift.

Finally I picked my way gingerly to the sledge and climbed back inside. Oleg shook the reins silently, and the mare started trotting again. He turned her head through the trees slightly, away from the road, and drove deeper into the forest. I tried to decide whether I was more afraid to call out to him and be answered, or to get no reply, and if I should try to jump from the sledge. And then suddenly we came through a narrow gap between trees onto a different road: a road as free of snow as summer, paved with innumerable small white pebbles like a mosaic instead of cobblestones, all of them laid under a solid sheet of ice.

The rails of the sledge rattled, coming onto the road, and then fell silent and smooth. The moon shone, and the road shone back, glistening under the pale light. The horse’s hooves went strange and quickly on the ice, the sledge skating along behind her. Around us, trees stretched tall and birchwhite, full of rustling leaves; trees that didn’t grow in our forest, and should have been bare with winter. White birds darted between the branches, and the sleigh bells made a strange kind of music, high and bright and cold. I huddled back into the blankets and squeezed my eyes shut and kept them so, until suddenly there was a crunching of snow beneath us again, and the sledge was already standing outside the gate of my own yard.

I all but leaped out, and darted through the gate and all the way to my door before I glanced around. I needn’t have run. Oleg drove away without ever looking back at me. The next morning, they found him outside his stables, lying frozen and staring blindly upwards in the snow, his horse and sledge put away.

I couldn’t forget at all, that week. They buried Oleg in the churchyard, and the bells ringing for him sounded like sleigh bells ringing too-high in a forest that couldn’t be. They would find me frozen like that outside the door, if I didn’t give the Staryk his gold next time, and if I did, then what? Would he put me on his white stag behind him, and carry me away to that pale cold forest, to live there alone forever with a crown of fairy silver of my own? I started up gasping at night with Oleg’s white frozen face looming over me, shivering with a chill inside me that my mother’s arms couldn’t drive away.

I decided I might as well try something as nothing, so I didn’t wait for the Staryk to come knocking this time. I fled to my grandfather’s house behind the thick city walls, where the streets were layered with dirty ice instead of clean white snow and only a handful of scattered barren trees stood in the lanes. I slept well that Shabbat night, but the next morning the candles had gone out, and that evening while I sat knitting with my grandmother, behind me the kitchen door rattled on its hinges, and she didn’t lift her head at the noise.

I slowly put aside my work, and went to the door, and flinched back when I had flung it wide: there was no narrow alleyway behind the Staryk, no brick wall of the house next door and no hardened slush beneath his feet. He stood outside in a garden of pale-limbed trees, washed with moonlight even though the moon hadn’t yet come out, as if I could step across the threshold and walk out of all the world.

There was a box instead of a purse upon the stoop, a chest made of pale white wood bleached as bone, bound around with thick straps of white leather and hinged and clasped with silver. I knelt and opened it. “Seven days this time I’ll grant you, to return my silver changed for gold,” the Staryk said in his voice like singing, as I stared at the heap of coins inside, enough to make a crown to hold the moon and stars. I didn’t doubt that the tsar would marry Irina, with this to make her dowry.

I looked up at him, and he down at me with his sharp silver eyes, eager and vicious as a hawk. “Did you think mortal roads could run away from me, or mortal walls keep me out?” he said, and I hadn’t really, after all.

“But what use am I to you?” I said desperately. “I have no magic: I can’t change silver to gold for you in your kingdom, if you take me away.”

“Of course you can, mortal girl,” he said, as if I was being a fool. “A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true; the proving makes it so.” And then he vanished, leaving me with a casket full of silver and a belly full of dismay.

I hadn’t been able to make sense of it before: What use would a mortal woman be to an elven lord, and if he wanted one, why wouldn’t he just snatch her? I wasn’t beautiful enough to be a temptation, and why should boasting make him want me? But of course any king would want a queen who really could make gold out of silver, if he could get one, mortal or not. The last thing I wanted was to be such a prize.

Isaac made the crown in a feverish week, laboring upon it in his stall in the marketplace. He hammered out great thin sheets of silver to make the fan-shaped crown, tall enough to double the height of a head, and then with painstaking care added droplets of melted silver in mimic of pearls, laying them in graceful spiraling patterns that turned upon themselves and vined away again. He borrowed molds from every other jeweler in the market and poured tiny flattened links by the hundreds, then hung glittering chains of them linked from one side of the crown to the other, and fringed along the rest of the wide fan’s bottom edge.

By the second day, men and women were coming just to watch him work. I sat by, silent and unhappy, and kept them off, until finally despite the cold the crowds grew so thick I became impatient and started charging a penny to stand and watch for ten minutes, so they’d go away; only it backfired, and the basket I’d put out grew so full I had to empty it into a sack under the table three times a day.

By the fifth day, I had made nearly as much silver as the Staryk had given me in the first place, and the crown was finished; when Isaac had assembled the whole, he turned and said, “Come here,” and set it upon my head to see whether it was well balanced. The crown felt cool and light as a dusting of snow upon my forehead. In his bronze mirror, I looked like a strange deepwater reflection of myself, silver stars at midnight above my brow, and all the marketplace went quiet in a rippling wave around me, silent like the Staryk’s garden.

I wanted to burst into tears, or run away; instead I took the crown off my head and put it back into Isaac’s hands, and when he’d carefully swathed it with linen and velvet, the crowds finally drifted away, murmuring to one another. My grandfather had sent his two manservants with me that day, and they guarded us to the duke’s palace. We found it full of bustle and noise from the tsar’s retinue and preparations: there was to be a ball that night, and all the household full of suppressed excitement; they knew of the negotiations underway.

We were put into a better antechamber this time to wait, and then the chaperone came to fetch me. “Bring it with you. The men stay here,” she said, with a sharp, suspicious glare. She took me upstairs to a small suite of rooms, not nearly so grand as the ones below: I suppose a plain daughter hadn’t merited better before now. Irina was sitting stiff as a rake handle before a mirror made of glass. She wore snow-white skirts and a silver-gray silk dress over them, cut much lower this time to make a frame around the necklace; her beautiful dark hair had been braided into several thick ropes, ready to be put up, and her hands were gripped tightly around themselves in front of her.

Her fingers worked slightly against one another, nervous, as the chaperone pinned up the braids, and I carefully set the crown upon them. It stood glittering beneath the light of a dozen candles, and the chaperone fell silent, her eyes dreamy as they rested on her charge. Irina herself slowly stood up and took a step closer to the mirror, her nervous hand reaching up toward the glass almost as if to touch the woman inside.

Whatever magic the silver had to enchant those around it either faded with use or couldn’t touch me any longer; I wished that it could, and that my eyes could be dazzled enough to care for nothing else. Instead I watched Irina’s face, pale and thin and transported, and I wondered if she would be glad to marry the tsar; to leave her quiet, small rooms for a distant palace and a throne. As she dropped her hand, our eyes met in the reflection: we didn’t speak, but for a moment I felt her a sister, our lives in the hands of others. She wasn’t likely to have any more choice in the matter than I did.

After a few minutes, the duke himself came in to inspect her, and paused in the doorway of the room behind her. Irina was still standing before the mirror; she turned and curtsied to her father, then straightened again, her chin coming up a little to balance the crown; she looked like a queen already. The duke stared at her as if he could hardly recognize his own daughter; he shook himself a little, pulling free of the pull, before he turned to me. “You will have your gold, Panovina,” he said. “And if your Staryk wants more of it, you will come to me again.”

So I had six hundred gold pieces for the casket and two hundred more for the bank, and my sack full of silver pennies besides; a fortune, for what good it would do me. At least my mother and father wouldn’t go cold or hungry again, when the Staryk had taken me away.

My grandfather’s servants carried it all home for me. He came downstairs, hearing my grandmother’s exclamations, and looked over all the treasure; then he took four gold coins out of the heap meant for the bank, and gave two each to the young men before he dismissed them. “Drink one and save one, you remember the wise man’s rule,” he said, and they both bowed and thanked him and dashed off to revel, elbowing each other and grinning as they went.

Then he sent my grandmother out of the room on a pretext, asking her to make her cheesecake to celebrate our good fortune; and when she was gone he turned to me and said, “Now, Miryem, you’ll tell me the rest of it,” and I burst into tears.

I hadn’t told my parents, or my grandmother, but I told him: I trusted my grandfather to bear it, as I hadn’t trusted them, not to break their hearts wanting to save me. I knew what my father would do, and my mother, if they found out: they would make a wall of their own bodies between me and the Staryk, and then I would see them fall cold and frozen before he took me away.

But my grandfather only listened, and then he said, “Do you want to marry him, then?” I stared at him, still wet-faced. He shrugged. “Sorrow comes to every house, and there’s worse things in life than to be a queen.”

By speaking so, he gave me a gift: making it my choice, even if it wasn’t really. I gulped and wiped away my tears, and felt better at once. After all, in cold, hard terms it was a catch, for a poor man’s daughter. My grandfather nodded as I calmed myself. “Lords and kings often don’t ask for what they want, but they can afford to have bad manners,” he said. “Think it over, before you turn away a crown.”

I was tempted more by the power my grandfather had given me than the promise of a crown. I thought of it: to harden my heart a little more and stand straight and tall when the Staryk came, to put my hand in his and make it my own will to go with him, so at least I could say the decision had been mine.

But I was my father’s daughter also, after all, and I found I didn’t want to be so cold. “No,” I said, low. “No, Grandfather, I don’t want to marry him.”

“Then you must make it better sense for him to leave you be,” my grandfather said.

The next morning I rose, and put on my best dress, and my fur cloak, and sent for a sledge to carry me. But as I fastened the cloak around my throat in the sitting room, I heard a high cold jangling of bells drifting faintly in from the street, not the bells of a hired harness. I opened the door, and a narrow elegant sleigh drew up outside, fashioned it seemed entirely out of ice and heaped with white furs; the wolfen stag drew it, legs flashing, and the Staryk held the reins of white leather. The street lay blanketed by a thick, unnatural silence: empty even in midmorning, not another soul or sledge or wagon anywhere in sight, and the sky overhead gray and pearled-over like the inside of oyster shells.

He climbed out and came to me, leaving long boot prints in the snow down the walk, and came up the stairs. “And have you changed my silver, mortal girl?” he asked.

I swallowed and backed up to the casket, standing in the room behind me. He followed me inside, stepping in on a winter’s blast of cold air, thin wispy flurries of snow whirling into the room around his ankles. He loomed over me to watch as I knelt down behind the casket and lifted up the lid: a heap of silver pennies inside, all I’d taken in the market.

He looked maliciously satisfied a moment, and then he stopped, puzzled, when he saw the coins were different: they weren’t fairy silver, of course, though they made a respectable gleam.

“Why should I change silver for gold,” I said, when I saw I’d caught his attention, “when I could make the gold, and have them both?” And then I untied the sack sitting beside the chest, to show him the heap of gold waiting inside.

He slowly reached in and lifted out a fistful of gold and let it drop back inside, frowning as he’d frowned each time: as though he didn’t like to be caught by his own promises, however useful a queen would be who could turn silver to gold. What would the other elven lords think, I wondered, if he brought home a mortal girl? Not much, I hoped. I daresay in the story, the king’s neighbors snickered behind their hands, at the miller’s daughter made a queen. And after all, she hadn’t even kept spinning.

“You can take me away and make me your queen if you want to,” I said, “but a queen’s not a moneychanger, and I won’t make you more gold, if you do.” His eyes narrowed, and I went on quickly, “Or you can make me your banker instead, and have gold when you want it, and marry whomever you like.”

I put my money in a vault and bought a house near my grandfather’s; we even lent some of the gold back to the duke for the wedding. Isaac was busy for a month making jewelry for all the courtiers and their own daughters, to make a fine show at the celebrations, but he found time to pay visits to my family. I saw Irina once more, when she drove out of the city with the tsar; she threw handfuls of silver out of the window of the carriage as they went through the streets, and looked happy, and perhaps she even was.

We left the business back home in Wanda’s hands. Everyone was used to giving her their payments by then, and she’d learned figuring; she couldn’t charge interest herself, but as long as she was collecting on our behalf it was all right, and by the time everyone’s debts had been repaid, she would have a handsome dowry, enough to buy a farm of her own.

I’ve never seen the Staryk again. But every so often, after a heavy snowfall, a purse of fairy silver appears on my doorstep, and before a month is gone, I put it back twice over full of gold.